The Treasure of Stonewycke

by Michael Phillips

  A soft ripple of laughter spread through the room.

  Then Macintyre’s amused expression turned solemn. “Miss Edwards, I have folks in my district who voted for me simply because they believed I cared. They don’t always agree with my politics, but they knew I’d try my best to do right by them. That’s how it works in a representative government. Now, here’s an issue over which there is a great deal of division. And I personally believe a positive vote, though it means going against my own party’s leader, is the best thing for our nation. So I’ve got to vote for it, because that’s what my constituents expect me to do. They don’t want a yes man to blindly do their bidding—or the bidding of a party leader. They want a man of principle and conscience. I may not always succeed in that area, nor will I always succeed in pleasing them, but I do always try.”

  “Is that what you told Mr. Wilson?” asked another reporter.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact that is exactly what I told him.”

  “Is your dismissal from his inner circle, or even from the party, a possibility?”

  “Mr. Wilson is a reasonable man,” answered Macintyre, “whom I—we all—deeply admire. He understands such principles as loyalty and conscience, and I am confident the Labour Party will rise above our current difficulties.”

  The grilling went on for another forty-five minutes.

  Hilary spent the time listening, for the most part. There were a dozen questions she’d intended to ask, but somehow their urgency diminished. Before she knew it the three members of Parliament were packing up their briefcases and making their exit. She shook the bemused expression from her face in the realization that the session was over.

  “Why, Eddie, me dear,” said Bert in a tone filled with good-natured taunting, “you disappoint me.”

  “What did I do?”

  “’Tis what you didn’t do, me dear!” exclaimed the veteran reporter. “I’ve come to expect you to go for the throat. But you sat there gentle as a bleedin’ lamb!”

  “Well, I . . .” she began, trying to make some excuse. She was even faintly disappointed in herself too. But then she realized she had no excuse to make. She wasn’t certain about the cause of her docility either.

  Hilary bid Bert goodbye and left. There was a less purposeful lilt to her step as she walked out—not exactly hesitant, but definitely thoughtful. Her slower gait seemed to indicate that her thoughts had been diverted, and were now too intense to concern themselves with the triviality of placing one foot in front of the other.

  Almost without realizing it she found herself walking to Charing Cross Station. She hadn’t intended on taking the tube. Nor had she intended to leave the city. But her feet seemed to know her will better than her mind at the moment. After a couple of transfers, she was soon on a train for Brighton.

  3

  Afternoon With a Friend

  The sky had reflected a hue of autumn gray since morning, but by late afternoon it had turned foreboding. The clouds hung low and the air smelled heavy and ominous with the imminent storm. The dismal pall spreading over the earth somehow suited Hilary’s quiet mood, and the air away from the pressures of the city was refreshing—for the moment, at least. Hilary wouldn’t want to stay away long. But just now the serene atmosphere of a half-deserted resort town in late fall suited her.

  She and her friend Suzanne Heywood strolled along the beachfront, making small talk about the endless rows of two- and three-story houses fronting the shore, poking now and then into a shop whose window had drawn their interest. On their right, a steady stream of waves rushed at the shore, their white-tipped crests offering the only contrast in color between the greenish gray of the sea and the blackish gray of the sky. Indeed, where sea and sky met in the distance, the horizon beyond which lay France and the Continent, the green and the black joined in an almost indistinguishable blur of slate.

  “This place can be soothing, can’t it?” said Hilary, pausing to inhale a breath of the heavy air.

  “Sometimes,” replied Suzanne. “But not in the summer when it’s crawling with tourists.”

  Hilary laughed.

  “That’s why I like winters here best,” her friend went on. “We great, would-be writers need our peace and quiet, you know.”

  Hilary smiled but said nothing. That’s what she liked about Suzanne—she never took herself too seriously. That was also probably one of the reasons she had sought her out on this day. In Suzanne she had always had a sympathetic ear, someone who understood, someone who would listen.

  How can two such different people remain so close? Hilary wondered. They had become friends over ten years ago when both were students at the university. There had been more similarities then, and their affinity did not seem so unusual.

  They found their common ground on the field of social and political battle. In the late 1950s they had been at the vanguard of the dawning social awareness that blossomed fully in the next decade. Hilary had been the firebrand, the central figure in every campus debate, the one standing on corners passing out handbills and button-holing passersby to espouse her cause. Suzanne came at protest from another direction. Where Hilary would have been comfortable commanding the troops of their activist band, Suzanne was its poet laureate, the mystic, the esoteric champion of causes more cognitive than practical. If world hunger were at issue, Suzanne would have been more likely to put herself on a starvation diet than join Hilary on a soapbox or march in a rally.

  Their different backgrounds had contributed, no doubt, to such divergent approaches. Hilary, from the working class, was bent on changing things in real and visible ways. Suzanne, from a wealthy and affluent family, daughter of a lord, was satisfied to voice her discontent with society using the more abstruse imagery of a poetic and largely quixotic nature. Her most practical act of protest back then had been the disavowal of her noble ties, and with that, her father’s money as well.

  She had joined Hilary in the latter’s stand against the aristocracy, even going so far, for her, as to circulate petitions advocating the dismantling of the ancient tradition. Such a position was short-lived, however, for as Suzanne reached her mid-twenties, she discovered it much easier to take the support her father offered than continue a penniless existence fighting against it. Lord Heywood had long since given up trying to convince her to get her head out of the clouds, and contented himself with providing the means to help her get on with life.

  Through the years both young women had changed, and both, curiously, had gravitated toward writing—Hilary attempting to change the world for the better through journalism, Suzanne working on a book-length collection of verse and scattered narrative of vague intent.

  But Hilary had learned that Suzanne, for all her flowery flummery about the earth, the sky, Greenpeace, and saving the whales, had a more than decent head on her shoulders. Though Suzanne was still occasionally apt to float in and out between realism and fancy, reminiscent of the months following her pilgrimage to Haight-Ashbury in 1965, Hilary had come to appreciate her depth of sensitivity and her willingness to be still and listen.

  Since the death of her father six months ago, Suzanne had been, unknown to Hilary, reflecting on a good many issues more solid and more traditional than either would have thought possible ten years before. The poet in her was at last awakening to see in a new light the world in which she had been raised.

  This dreary fall afternoon the burden of talking and listening had been equally divided between the two, but the conversation had focused on lighter topics, mostly filling the gaps since they had last seen each other. Hilary had come to talk with her friend and pour out some of her recent conflicts. But now that she was here, she grew reticent, wondering if she could share her secret even with her best friend.

  Hilary paused at one of the shops and nudged Suzanne inside. The Oriental style boutique was clearly attempting to cater to the current fashion craze. Absently Hilary pulled a dress from one of the racks, a coarsely woven sari with an Indian print design.


  “Are you thinking of changing your image?” laughed Suzanne.

  Hilary gave the dress more cogent attention, then smiled. “It is more you, isn’t it?”

  Suzanne took the dress and held it up in front of her body. “I rather like it,” she said.

  Hilary stood back and gave the effect serious scrutiny, musing that she and Suzanne had certainly come toward the mainstream over the years. She had mellowed more obviously than Suzanne, though she defended her acquiescence to the so-called Establishment with the argument that most newspapers were not willing to hire sandal-shod hippies. And through the years she had to admit she had become comfortable with a role she once might have spoken against.

  Suzanne, on the other hand, still appeared at a glance to be offbeat in her approach to life. Even at thirty-one, she still bore the progressive look that this dress represented, with straight, long blond hair, often with a flower tucked behind her ear. Her large, intense eyes needed no assistance from makeup to give them depth. She made a point of keeping her exterior self plain, yet such a practice could not hide her lovely features.

  “Should I buy it?” asked Suzanne.

  “The price is outrageous.”

  “My contribution to assuaging hunger in India.”

  “No doubt the profits will just fill the pockets of some fat Indian lord or prince.” But even as Hilary spoke the words, she recalled her own current dilemma. The reminder made her all the more unprepared for Suzanne’s uncharacteristic response.

  “Oh, come on, Hilly,” she said as they exited the shop and continued down the walk, “you don’t still seriously believe that all the world’s ills are because of fat lords and princes?”

  “What! Is that you, Suzanne?” exclaimed Hilary. “Standing up for the nobles?”

  “Times change,” said Suzanne quietly. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately. You know, post-twenties re-evaluation of values and attitudes.”

  “It sounds serious. What brought all this on?”

  “I suppose my father’s death. He was a good man, trying to do some good things, and I guess maybe for the first time I’m beginning to see his life and what he stood for in a true light.”

  “I’m sure your father was very respectable and had admirable qualities,” replied Hilary. “But of all people I’d think you would know that the nobility is responsible for so much of what is wrong in the world. That’s what we were always fighting for, remember?”

  “The environment’s getting ripped off and the tuna and seals are being killed just as much in countries where they have no aristocracy at all. The world’s problems go deeper than the policies of Parliament.”

  “But its policies aren’t helping matters.”

  “Politics is a whole different scene. Peace, helping the earth to survive, Hilary, it’s an inner thing. When I became a Christian several years ago, nothing much changed. I just kept on with my life as it was. I believed differently, but I didn’t live any differently. But as I’ve grown since then, my outlook has gradually shifted, especially lately. I don’t want to blame people like my father anymore for problems we all have a responsibility for.”

  “Of course, of course. But don’t we as Christians have a duty to change society for the better, to bring our values to bear on politics? What can possibly justify how out of touch some of those men are? The House of Lords is hardly a body representative of the people.”

  “No one ever accused it of being such. That’s what the House of Commons is for.”

  “Hardly a great deal better.”

  “Give it time, Hilly,” Suzanne replied calmly. “Look how far it’s come! A hundred years ago women couldn’t vote, and there was no such thing as a Labour Party. A woman like you would never have been able to raise herself up so she had a legitimate voice in current affairs. The fact that you do have an impact perhaps speaks for our system rather than against it. There’s even talk of a woman Prime Minister someday.”

  “Interested?” said Hilary. “The way you’re going I wouldn’t be surprised to see you in the running! I never knew you had such political leanings.”

  Suzanne laughed. As she did, there was a faint hint in her eyes and in the musical quality of her voice which revealed that perhaps, in her quieter moments, she had given such notions a few fleeting thoughts. But she would admit to nothing.

  “You ought to know better than that,” she said at length. “Me? I’m the society dropout, don’t you know? So my father used to say.”

  “You don’t fool me, Suzanne. You’re more in tune than you let on. Why else would you devote so much time to your book?”

  “Just poetry, dear.”

  “Poetry with political undercurrents, if I judge your changing interests correctly. I make an innocent comment about Parliament being out of touch, and you launch into a sermonette about the importance of waiting for change.”

  “Not a bad solution, in most cases. If a nation or a government is moving in a healthy direction, time usually takes care of many problems without the need for revolt and dissent and bloodshed. The activists like you would raise people to action, while I would rather see people focus on inner realities, and let time heal the wounds of society.”

  “There you go again, Suzanne! You’re impossible,” laughed Hilary. “You are full of contrasts! Ex-hippie lauds praises of Parliamentary system—I can see my next month’s article now! But doesn’t it bother you that even the House of Commons, even the Labour Party itself, is full of noblemen?”

  “I don’t have a problem with noblemen. I’m the daughter of one, remember? It’s not the system that’s bad, just occasionally how we choose to use it.”

  “But only in rare cases does that system—the House of Commons particularly—ever genuinely represent the man on the street. It’s the nobility, I tell you. They’ve got a lock on everything.”

  “Always it comes back to the nobility with you,” laughed Suzanne good-naturedly. “You’ve really got a problem with it.”

  “Not a problem,” Hilary shot back defensively. “I just thought I’d find more support from you, that’s all.”

  “Support?” repeated Suzanne inquisitively. “About what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “It’s just not that big a deal. There are so many more important battles to fight, Hilly. I wish I could give you a dose of my so-called blue blood so you could see it works just like your own.”

  Hilary was quiet for a moment. The thought of blue blood running through her veins was not an issue she wanted to face squarely.

  “You think I’m prejudiced,” she said at length.

  “I didn’t say that,” replied Suzanne. “I simply think you’re allowing yourself to see only one side of a very complex question.”

  Again Hilary did not reply. Then, after a brief silence, she attempted to shake off the melancholy mood that had settled over her. “I underestimated you, Suzanne,” she said. “You’re no counter-culturalist at all! Underneath the disguise, you’re nothing but a political philosopher!”

  “You better keep it to yourself. I do have my reputation as a hippie to preserve.”

  “What would your father think if he heard you now?”

  “I’ve often wondered that.”

  “I’m sure he would be pleased,” said Hilary. “Probably more than I am to hear the words that are coming out of your mouth.”

  Now it was Suzanne’s time to grow introspective. “I often wish I’d begun to think things through sooner. Now that he’s gone, it’s too late for me to tell him so much I feel.”

  “You were only doing what you thought best,” said Hilary.

  “I suppose. But I had such blinders on. All I could see was my own little world. When I moved into that commune in Soho after I got back from San Francisco, I think it really hurt him.”

  “Didn’t he get you out of there?”

  “No, he pretty much let me do my own thing. But that scene wasn’t for me. Everyone sat around talking about having their own ‘space,’ writin
g weird poetry, singing Hindu songs, and smoking marijuana. They talked about making the earth a different place, but they were all so caught up in their own little private worlds—just as I was. I really did want to make a difference, in my own way, not just sit around and prattle about it while listening to some Maharishi’s nonsense. I wanted something I could sink my teeth into, you know?”

  “And Carnaby Street?”

  “Yeah, my father was involved in that. By then I’d done a flip-flop and came to him asking for the money. And he gave it to me. He’d come to the point where he was content to let my self-expression run its course. Time, you know.”

  “I never did quite understand why you quit the boutique. It seemed like a good thing.”

  “In a way, I suppose it was. I made enough money to eat on, trying to convince myself I was being self-supporting and independent from my father. But the Carnaby Street scene was another trip all its own. Just like Soho, only on a different plane. And King’s Road. You remember I tried that too?”

  “How could I forget!”

  “At Carnaby you had all the tourists, and then all the boutique owners trying to be hip and pretend they were marching to the proverbial ‘different drummer.’ It was so in to be weird in ’68 and ’69. Sgt. Pepper, you know—if it seems cool, it must be great. If it looks strange, wear it. If it sounds trippy, like some Tibetan monk may have said it, then embrace it. The little Carnaby Street subculture was in a world of its own, yet all the while chasing after the power of the almighty quid like the bigger businesses round the corner in Piccadilly. No, that wasn’t for me either. I’ve been happy since I moved down to Brighton. I’ve got my little flat, and I can do my writing without being hassled.”